Volunteer campaigner speaks out as her charity is hit by funding crisis

Adi Roche’s Chernobyl Children International group is facing a cash crisis as donations plummet because of the financial slump.

In an exclusive interview with the Irish Sunday Mirror, the volunteer revealed the charity’s income has dropped by 50% during the past three years and some projects have been affected.

She also fears there is a threat to its life-saving programmes unless public donations pick up again next year.

Adi said: “We are reeling from the recession and we’ve had to hugely refine our work because our funding has gone down by a half.

“We are talking about the money that comes in from bag packs, flag days, everything that comes in from school children and ordinary fundraising.

“The impact has been horrendous. We have ended up in awful situations where we are saying, ‘Can we perform life-saving heart surgery for this baby who will die unless we do it or can we provide hospice care?’

“You are talking about life or death situations and none of us want to play God. It is heartbreaking.”

The charity had a major setback in June when a €250,000 residential centre for boys in Belarus, built by Irish workers, was destroyed.

Adi said: “A dream was shattered by the lightning which struck the building and set it on fire.

“I flew out the following day with a medical team and thank God I wasn’t flying out to funerals.

“The boys saved each other as some are so disabled they wouldn’t have been able to get out themselves.

“But now they are homeless and I am going back out in 10 days and we are trying to find a way of rebuilding their shattered dream.

“All these boys wanted was the justice of freedom and a home of their own.

“When I went out one of the lads said to me, ‘Adi, has God forgotten us again? I was treated like an animal, I lived on the floor until one day you picked me up and my world changed because you gave me a wheelchair and then a home and now we have nothing’.

“They are in deep despair these lads. They had three years of freedom in this beautiful residential terrace of little houses built by loving Irish builders and now it is in tatters.”

Adi with youths at opening of new houses

Adi vowed to do everything in her power to rebuild the facility, adding: “I made a promise to those lads that we’ll restore their broken dreams.

“The people of Ireland, despite our recession, will not be found wanting.”

But Adi knows it will not be easy to keep everything going.

She said: “Even though I do not have the money to rebuild the homes I am going to go ahead in the hope and belief it will come.

“I haven’t a bob to my name to do it at the moment but I am hoping the people of Ireland will stand behind us.

“It is the pensioners, it’s the people who are on the breadline themselves, they are the people that have always thrown a lifeline to these children.”

It costs €1.2million a year to run the charity’s programmes but it will be impossible to keep them going unless funding increases.

Adi said she is constantly thinking of ways to bring in revenue as CCI is “cut to the bone, there is no flesh on this charity”.

She added: “There is a small pot out there and we are trying our best to get our own little slice.

“We have been cutting our cloth but rather than saying downsize we are saying right size.

“What we are trying to do is see what we can change and are concentrating on areas of disability, mental health, the cardiac, hospice and shutting down orphanages.

“The reason we’ve been able to cut to the bone without really changing too much of the service we deliver is because people are giving their skill and time for free.

“But we cannot sustain it indefinitely because we still have to get in €1.2million and I know we are not making our targets in the first half of this year which is very depressing.

“Unless we turn this around within the next 12 months there will be massive difficulties for us in terms of sustainability.

“We are fast running out of money, we are even eating into the reserves we have for emergencies.

“Once you start doing that it is nerve-racking, we’ve got to get the money in or we won’t be able to survive.

“We had a deficit from last year, this year we are already building another deficit so we have to raise even more this year.

“And I don’t want to hit a stone wall. I want to be able to plan for 2014 and I want to be able to look these families in the eye, to look these children in the eye, to say we will be there for you.”

Adi holding a tot with Ali Hewson and Bono

Adi emphasised that although the Chernobyl nuclear explosion happened 27 years ago, there is still a huge need to provide vital care.

She added: “The legacy of Chernobyl is it will never be over because of what has been done to the DNA. You cannot undo that damage.”

And Adi said the younger generation are still bearing the scars of the disaster.

She explained: “The amount of women that sadly carry damaged life. We would be seeing that in the mental asylums, in the orphanages.”

One of the medical problems the children suffer is “Chernobyl heart”, a cardiac condition related to the effects of radiation.

Adi said: “In response to that the people of Ireland sponsor six-times-a-year cardiac missions and they save lives.

“We are continuing to see the damage and that is what is so different about Chernobyl to any other tragedy, it is the longevity. Huge numbers of people are affected.

"They are eating food from contaminated soil, drinking milk from cows eating contaminated grass, so it is self-perpetuating.

“We are trying to shut down orphanages because we believe the children deserve to have parental care, so we are working on a very comprehensive programme to shut down orphanages.

“We’ve about 30 houses which we call ‘Homes Of Hope’ bought through the donations of Irish people.

“Then we have foster families who take about eight to 10 children in each of these homes and they rear them as their own.

“You are setting up an artificial family but they become a family. We were able to shut two orphanages as a result of that programme.

“Children thrive best where there is love and family rather than being thrown into an institution.”

One of the projects scaled back is the Rest and Recuperation Programme which has brought 23,500 kids here since 1986.

Adi said: “We halved the numbers being brought this year because I didn’t want to cut back on things such as life-saving surgery.

“Every donation counts and it costs just €1,000 to save a child’s life. Sometimes I get overwhelmed when I see our budget but I wouldn’t be able to face myself if I didn’t leave no stone unturned, that I didn’t try every angle to keep it going."